why are you still alive?

That’s another question that a collection of very lousy therapists, plus a whole gaggle of regular people, have asked me: Why are you still alive? If there are these nasty types who are so bad that you have to have this undercover protection, why haven’t they got you? It seems to me, so many of them have said, that if they wanted you this badly, they’d get you. No protection would stop it.

Most of the people who have put forth this argument have done so in a very superior and arrogant manner, whipping out their trump card and pronouncing judgment on my sanity with gloriously smug, self-satisfied smiles. Slap, slap. That’s what I want to do, but of course I don’t. There are a great many people in this world who need a good slap or two. It is this attitude I despise, this smugness. The unspoken words: The very fact that you’re not dead means you’re nuts. Well, that is indeed one thing that my continued existence could mean. But there’s one more thing it could mean, and it’s a thing no backwater greenfield graduated-at-the-bottom-of-my-class therapist would even allow as possible: I’m still alive because the protection is very efficient. I despise the attitude, but not the question. The question is one of the many that I have myself.

I’ve gone through my blog pages from the very beginning and mostly sanitized the anger I was pouring out in 2008 and 2009. There are equations in people’s heads that have been put there via trickle-down from the psychiatric community over the last twenty-five years: Emotional = nuts. Angry = nuts. Washing your hands too many times = nuts, and so on. I thought that some readers might reconsider the whole sanity issue if I took out my angriest words and sentences, or if I toned them down, and so for the most part I’ve done this. Another word I extracted almost every time I found it was the word kill. I’ve replaced it with harm, hurt, things like that. Saying that someone wants to kill you = nuts.

But that was the word in the room, and if I’m to hold to the truth as I’ve heard and seen it, I have to use that word in this post, because that was the word. On Wednesday 2 July of 2008, that was the word. Matthew and I were in the room, and we were there with the word kill. It wasn’t that people wanted to hurt me or harm or get me. It was the k-word.

Can you imagine what a shock that was to me, can you empathize with that? I’d only known for ten days that I was being protected from criminal stuff. And in those ten days, this is what I had envisioned someone possibly doing to me: a beating; broken teeth; broken bones;a stay in the hospital; maybe even as far as rape, but that was it. The idea that Judith’s pals would actually go all the way to the k-word was so ridiculous to my own mind that it never even entered my head in those ten days. That’s what I was nagging Matthew about on that July second: you’ve got too many people in the library with me all the time. I don’t like it. Nobody’s gonna beat me up in the library, for christ’s sake. And that’s when the k-word entered the room, and that’s when I kept saying You’re kidding, right? I couldn’t take it in. It took me days to take it in.

So why am I still alive? I don’t know. Matthew never told me how the protection works, how many people are involved in it, and why it is that someone doesn’t just shoot me while I’m walking along the street. No answers, no answers. The word kill was the one that Matthew used, and I have a sense that fed types from Burlington, Vermont would only get involved in the first place if it was a potential k-word situation. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe such mucky-mucks in the cop world would have protected a nobody like me unless the k-word was in the picture.

Another question never answered? How long is this going to go on? Little crumbs that told me almost nothing were all I got. On 13 July, a very bad day (this day has to be a page of its own), I got a crumb. We were sitting across from each other at a table in his backyard, waiting for his pal to do something I wasn’t supposed to see. We were both grim. I said: This has gone on longer than you people thought it would, hasn’t it? He says Yes in one of his idiot-voices, but there is no idiot in his eyes. His eyes are intelligent and sane and serious, as they always are, and they are full of regret. There is never an alcholic, idiotic loon in his eyes, no matter what ludicrous things he is wearing or saying or doing. Matthew’s eyes are always sane, and always contain the evidence of an extremely keen mind.

Another couple of crumbs: during the first two weeks of August there was all the talk about driver’s licenses and cars and maybe going to a new apartment. Around the twelfth there was a request that I should buy him a present. I argued, but my arguing was mostly just teasing. And he says: After all this, you can’t buy me a present? And I asked if “all this” was going to be over soon, and he said, of course, Maybe. And then, during the wee hours between August 17th and August 18th, just once: it’s almost over.

I don’t know why I’m still alive. I asked him more than once, no response. How am I still alive, also unanswered. When do they get tired of me and move on to other business? Unanswered. When do you people go on to other business and stop following me around? No answer. The fact that I cannot describe the process that has resulted in me still being alive doesn’t mean I’m nuts. It means I’ve asked for the knowledge, the description of this process that kept me alive, and have been denied this information. The fact that I can’t answer these things doesn’t mean the k-word was not in that room on that day in July of 2008. The fact that these protectors chose to protect me in this hellish undercover manner, never to show me an ID, never to knock on my door and tell truth to me, does not make me nuts. It makes me their property, perhaps. Their bait, perhaps. But it doesn’t make me nuts.

In this very town, turners falls, two people over the years have mentioned the word mafia to me in relation to their own lives. Two women. In 1993, one of these women told me she and her family believed that one of her sisters had been murdered by her mafia boyfriend. In 2009, the other one told me that her former husband had been a mafia man. And my mind, my intelligent, educated mind, did not jump up inside me and say: Nuts! Inside me my mind allowed for both possibilities: the possbility of ordinary people stumbling into mob people, and the possibility that these women were very angry and hurt and wanted to find the cause of their suffering. But never nuts. I’ve thought these two trolls unstable over other things, but not over using the m-word, and not over believing that they or their relatives had unwittingly brought mob people into their lives. Why can’t that same objective, critical thinking be afforded to me.